Not Just a Book Review - Creating a World Without Poverty

Shortly after receiving his Nobel Peace Prize, Mohammad Yunus (Founder of Grameen Bank and other Grameen social businesses in Bangladesh) wrote a book titled "Creating a World Without Poverty" which goes into length on how social businesses can be used to alleviate poverty across the world - there's no need to read a book review to see if it will interest you. Just turn to the last few pages of the book where his nobel peace prize speech is - if you find it interesting, do read the book - otherwise, ask others to do what I've suggested when they ask about this book.

Here's an introduction to the idea of social businesses. Social businesses are businesses which primarily focus on addressing a social problem in a sustainable manner (i.e. businesses which will become self sustaining with the income they make after a period of time). There are quite a number of successful social businesses in the world - most of the Grameen companies in Bangladesh, Aravind Eye Care Hospitals in India, Selco in India among many others.

In his book, Yunus discusses multiple bottom lines such as profit (financial), value added to the society (social), environmental impact and others but mainly discusses how a business can never treat both the financial bottom-line and the social bottom-line with equal importance because in the end the decisions they make will favour one of them. For example, if a beverage company is looking at a way to discard waste water and they arrive at two possible solutions - one that is environmentally friendly but will reduce the margins of the company by 5% and another solution that is not environmentally friendly and barely affects the margin of the company. A profit making company which is answerable to its investors will surely choose the latter solution without a doubt.

Yunus also talks about why social businesses are the way forward - he discusses for profit companies taking a one dimensional view of human beings as robots that will just complete given tasks and discusses how non-profits and foundations are always dependent on grants and donations to keep their operations going - getting these grants and donations itself takes up a lot of time for them. I would agree with this point of view also and I think many people would.

Yunus says that social businesses should focus on benefiting the poor, especially women. I agree with him but in some cases, a startup would need to scale in order to remain sustainable and reduce the cost of the product/service in order to be affordable for poor people. In this case, the business must have a vision of addressing the poorest people of society and aggressively work towards it. There are plenty of social business opportunities which are needed (in India and other developing nations) even for people who are not poor such as quality primary and secondary schools, health initiatives and many more.

Social action forums as Yunus puts it is a place where like minded people get together and think of ideas to solve social problems and also set goals for them. This is a brilliant idea which is already happening in many places.

Last but not the least, in the end of the book Yunus discusses the creation of poverty museums so that people of the next generation see the horror the previous generation of poor people have gone through. I don't think thats enough. Films should be made about this and spread like wildfire.

Do share your thoughts on social businesses and the book if you've read it. If you are interested in starting a social business and need some funding, you might want to approach Grameen Creative Labs - an organisation setup by Mohammad Yunus himself to support social businesses.